"Designed by Apple in California" is for people who love pictures of phones.

Further Reading

Move over, MacBook Pro—there's a new Apple book in town. It's called Designed by Apple in California, and it's a coffee table book filled with pictures of Apple's hardware. The book, like so many other Apple products, is available in two sizes: a 10.20" by 12.75" "Small" version that sells for £169 and a 13" by 16.25" "Large" version that costs £249.

The book is only a partial history of design at Apple, and it would be better described as a portfolio of Jony Ive's work. It starts in 1998 with the iMac and ends in 2015 with the Apple Pencil, and it doesn't just cover the successful designs—oddball one-offs like the G4 Cube are in there, too. The linen-bound book is "printed on specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink" and "was developed over an eight-year period."

Jony Ive is still a part of Apple's executive team and he still occasionally gives interviews and narrates product videos, but in recent years, he seems to have scaled back his role at the company. In mid-2015, he handed off his "day-to-day managerial responsibilities" to Industrial Design VP Richard Howarth and User Interface Design VP Alan Dye.

If the book included inside stories about the design of the products it chronicles, it might be an interesting read—as it is, it's only going to appeal to people who want to pay a lot of money to stare at lovingly rendered phones and laptops. It will be on display at Apple's retail stores, where you can idly leaf through it as you wait for your Genius Bar appointment to start.